Get off your ass and VOTE, Atlanta

Tomorrow the City of Atlanta will hold runoff elections for the Mayor's race, City Council President, City Council Post 2 At Large, and City Council District 6. I won't be making new endorsements this time around because everyone I said I was voting for in the November 3rd general election either won outright or made the runoff, so my reasoning then still holds now.

Instead, I want to emphasize the importance of every single voter in the City of Atlanta turning out tomorrow to cast a ballot. First, let's dispel a few myths about runoff elections:

1. "It will take too long." Not so, since sadly turnout is projected to be in the ridiculously low category. In the general election, only 24% of Atlanta voters cast a ballot, and turnout for a runoff is usually below half the turnout for the general. It took me less than 5 minutes to vote on November 3rd, so really you should be able to carve out the 15 minutes it will take to find your precinct, cast a ballot, and head on to work in the morning or home after work at night. Don't be lazy!

2. "I can't vote in a runoff if I didn't vote in the general." I am not sure where this myth comes from, but it's completely not true. Nobody checks your name against voters who cast ballots on November 3rd. If you are a registered voter in the Atlanta city limits, you can vote in the runoff even if you've never cast a ballot in your life. Do NOT let anyone convince you that you have somehow waived your right to be heard.

3. "The candidate who got the most votes on election day always wins anyhow, so why bother." Oh how some candidates wish this were true! All you need to do is look at the 2008 Senate primary to see how false that is. Vernon Jones had a huge lead on the other candidates in the primary, but lost handily to Jim Martin in the runoff. In fact, runoff elections usually feature SUCH low turnout that it really is unpredictable as to who will win the race. One thing is for certain--your vote can absolutely make a difference. My City Council District, #6, was won in a runoff by just FIVE VOTES in 2005.

4. "My candidate lost the first time around, so why should I care." Most losing candidates in these crowded races have gone on to endorse someone who made it into the runoff, so why not see who they endorsed and decide if maybe they have a good reason to urge their supporters in that direction?

5. "It won't matter; this city will still be screwed up no matter who is elected." This may be true, but at least if you vote you won't feel like you squandered the opportunity to help stop it because you had a bunch of excuses and couldn't get your butt off the sofa. Besides, there are some important potential landmarks to be gained by tomorrow's races, depending on where you live--we could see the first gay man and Asian-American elected to city council, we could see the first black lesbian elected to Georgia state house. We could see Atlanta's mayorship held by a white woman for the first time in eons. It could be the first election where a major southern city's gay vote decided numerous elections. Tomorrow could be historic in so many ways--don't you want to be a part of it?

Now the details: polls are open from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m tomorrow. Find your polling place here. Review a sample ballot here.

As I said above, just 24% of registered voters in City of Atlanta voted in the November 3rd general election. If we are lucky, just half of that will vote in this runoff. That means about one in eight of us will be deciding who will run this city at a crucial juncture in our governance. That, frankly, is just sad. I really hope everyone who reads this site who lives in the City of Atlanta will decide to be part of the electorate, rather than part of the problem.

OK, stepping off my soapbox now. Good luck to the candidates and the many people I know who are busting their asses to get good people elected. (You can sleep starting Wednesday!)

Serious Question of the Day

Remind me again why we continue to pretend Joe Lieberman is a Democrat?

Reminder: Virtual Candidate Forum Today

As I posted about on Friday, the Committee for a Better Atlanta's Virtual Candidate Forum is today from 4:30 to 7:00pm. Already, some great questions have been posted on CfaBA's website, and I am sure even better questions will be asked during the live forum itself.

Here is the schedule of candidate question sessions, if you want to ask questions or just see what each has to say:

4:30 pm Kasim Reed (Mayor)
4:45 pm Amir Faroki (City Council Post 2 At-Large)
5:00 pm Clair Muller(City Council President)
5:15 pm Ceasar Mitchell (City Council President)
5:30 pm Mary Norwood (Mayor)
5:45 pm Liz Coyle (City Council District 6)
6:00 pm Alex Wan (City Council District 6)
6:15 pm Aaron Watson (City Council Post 2 At-Large)

Depending on how much I get to participate and whether it ends up as interesting as I'm hoping for, I may have a summary up later tonight for those of you who can't make it.

Serious Question of the Day

Would Sarah Palin be such a political or cultural hot commodity today if she wasn't hot (i.e., more physically attractive than average)?

I consider her to be the Anna Kournikova of politics, and I find that to be a sad and potentially dangerous thing. But I want to know if my 12 readers agree, and if so what you think it says about our culture that a hefty chunk of our population has elevated a nincompoop to politically iconic status simply because she's hot.

Questions for the Candidates?

In what I can only assume was a complete and total mistake (calling me a "prominent blogger" makes me question your judgment!), the Committee for a Better Atlanta has invited me to participate in a Virtual Mayoral Forum next Tuesday from 4:30 to 7pm. The event will be hosted live on CBA’s online community at http://www.betteratlanta.org/. I have been asked to pass this information on to you, my 12 readers, so that you can submit questions for Norwood and Reed during the forum. If you aren't comfortable submitting your own questions and you want me to ask the candidates something, put it in the comments, or email me at sarawara@gmail.com if you are not comfortable posting your question for all to see.

In addition, you should tune in on Tuesday, since this really is a fairly cool concept and probably will be a little more interesting than the standard televised debates.

The Committee for a Better Atlanta will also be allowing us to pose questions to the City Council candidates in the various races that have gone to runoff--Clair Muller vs. Ceasar Mitchell for the Council President slot, Amir Farokhi vs. Aaron Watson for At Large Post 2, and Alex Wan vs. Liz Coyle for District 6. So please pass along questions for them, if you have them, as well.

If nothing else, it is nice that even local politics are embracing the power and opportunities of social media. I still am surprised I was included in this because I feel like a blogging peon, but want to give everyone the opportunity to participate. So have at it!

On Advocacy

It is very easy for people to make fun of, look down upon, and pass judgment upon lawyers. As I have often said to friends, lawyers have the reputational issue they do because generally people only need one of us at the worst points in life: you have been injured, you have been accused of a crime, you have been sued, you are getting a divorce, you need to declare bankruptcy, or someone has died. As a result, it often feels to people who suddenly need to interact with lawyers that we are profiting from your misfortune, because we get paid for the work we do on some of the worst days of your life.

But on the worst days of your life, when your property, your liberty, or your rights are at risk, I assure you that you will want the most vigorous advocate you can find. You will want the person who will leave no stone unturned in trying to find the evidence of your innocence or the police misconduct that will keep you out of jail. You will want the person who persuades the judge not to give your ex sole custody of your children. You will want the person who makes sure your company is not run out of business by a massive punitive damages award simply because you made a great product that was involved in an isolated and unforeseeable injury. You will want the strongest advocate you can find and afford, and you will want that person to agree to represent you even if you are not 100% pure. Because frankly, nobody is.

When we sign up to go to law school, we know we will someday take an oath to vigorously advocate on behalf of our clients. We will agree to keep their secrets in virtually all circumstances (except when telling them can prevent death or serious injury to someone else). We will agree to take on representation we may later be ethically prohibited from withdrawing from even if we never get paid. We will agree to take positions that we may not personally agree with, because they are the best position for our client. And we will agree to put our own self-interest behind the interests of our clients virtually all the time. This is part and parcel of becoming a lawyer.

We agree to all of these things because we believe that vigorous advocacy is a necessary part of our criminal and civil justice system, which for all of its faults is the best one in the world. We recognize that we hold tremendous responsibility within that system as "officers of the court" to bring injustice to light, to prevent the entry of falsehood into the record whenever we can, and to ensure that every litigant's rights are protected whenever possible. Thought it is fashionable to assume we walk into court and lie every day, throw out the bad documents if we don't feel like turning them over to the other side, and train our witnesses how to wriggle out of responsibility for their actions, the truth down in the trenches is not even remotely close to this. In 9 years of practice, I can count on one hand, not using all of the fingers even, the number of lawyers I have worked with or battled against who I truly felt pushed the bounds of legal ethics. These people are usually treated as pariahs by the rest of us who are, by and large, passionate about upholding what we have sworn to do.

Some people can't fathom the commitments our profession requires, and for those people it is easy to announce moral absolutes about how they would rather get fired than represent this type of criminal defendant or that corporate behemoth with sketchy accusations against them. Perhaps they are incapable of compartmentalizing, and cannot understand that preventing police and prosecutorial excess is important even when doing so in defense of someone who committed armed robbery or rape. Perhaps they are incapable of anything but strict adherence to a particular ideology, and prefer not to examine it too closely to see if it should be revised from time to time. Whatever the reason, for people who recognize their own unsuitability for this profession to criticize the way in which others have performed it is ludicrous.

Kasim Reed defended large corporations accused of discrimination and other violations of employees' statutory rights. Not every case in which discrimination is alleged is meritorious, and not every corporate defendant accused of discrimination is branded an evildoer for all time.

Some plaintiffs' employment cases are bogus, and those should be weeded out and dismissed so that the meritorious cases can be resolved faster and more amicably. If a county has 20 rape allegations in one month and half of them are proven to be false accusations, then it makes it harder for the other 10 to obtain justice. The same is true with frivolous plaintiffs' litigation--it makes it harder for the meritorious cases to obtain justice more quickly.

In addition, corporations are not immutable objects incapable of change. A person may be a rapist for all time if convicted of (and actually guilty of rape.) But corporations are different--boards fire CEOs and hire new ones, company policies change, and the corporation that paid women less than men in 1979 shouldn't have that hanging over their heads thirty years later if it's no longer the case. To take Reed to task for representing Cracker Barrel in 1999 based upon cases that occurred years earlier completely ignores the potential for change within an organization. Perhaps this is by design--all large corporations are inherently evil, to some. But once we get to that point, we're demanding the sort of ideological purity that will disqualify virtually every candidate.

But even if I were retained to represent Cracker Barrel in a race discrimination case today--why shouldn't I? I am not going to lie, cheat or steal to win the case, I am only going to use the facts and evidence, legal defenses and procedural maneuvers legitimately available to me. If the company has really engaged in systemic discrimination, then that should usually result in either a verdict at trial or a settlement in the event the company's lawyers decide a trial win is unlikely. This is exactly how the free market is supposed to work--if someone is indefensibly injured or damaged by a corporation, the corporation pays. And if I am able to obtain dismissal of the case or keep the verdict/settlement low, then the case probably wasn't as meritorious is plaintiffs first believed.

What bothers me most about Cardinale's position is that he presumes all of the defendants Reed represented had violated the rights of employees, and that Reed was therefore working against workers' rights by advocating on behalf of those companies. Again, should we presume that simply because corporations are always evil and hurting people however they can? Do we really believe that? I have worked on hundreds of cases at this point in my career, and I have seen very few true slam dunks of liability. I have seen many, many cases that fall in the grey areas, and many cases that are obviously frivolous. To completely ignore the possibility that some of these companies were not liable for discrimination or statutory violations, and simply assume Reed was defending bad companies, is simplistic and unsupported by the evidence.

I've glossed over many of the points I wanted to make but struggled with, because they are difficult to wrestle with in one post. For example, the notion that a junior or midlevel associate in a large law firm gets to pick and choose what clients he wants to do work for is, frankly, ludicrous. Even now with 9 years of experience and some decent seniority, if I said "no, I can't represent Cracker Barrel because I disagree with things they've done in the past," I would expect it to potentially get me fired, and certainly lead to negative comments in performance reviews, etc. Earlier this year an associate at the law firm of Quinn Emmanuel was fired just a few days after sending an email in which he questioned whether the firm should be defending the Washington Redskins against constitutional claims brought by Native Americans. Law firms do not provide the freedom to pick and choose your clients as an associate, and I would never presume to demand that anyone to turn down an assignment when it could get them fired (and potentially blackballed within their industry to boot.)

Every single candidate for political office who is an attorney has probably represented an individual or entity who was guilty or liable of something bad. If we are going to start holding candidates to the standard that they can't have represented any client who ever committed a bad act, then we might as well just disqualify all lawyers from political office. Considering that our President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and more than half of Congress are lawyers...have fun picking from what's leftover after the disqualifications are complete.

I am not the slightest bit ashamed of my profession, or of having represented corporations accused of injuring people. They deserved a strong defense, and I provided it. I will not apologize for that simply because some people are incapable of understanding that I am fulfilling a necessary role in our justice system. Kasim Reed should not have to apologize for it either.

Let a Lawyer Show You How It's Done

(This post will be a refutation of the factual assertions made by Atlanta Progressive News in two articles about Kasim Reed's representation of corporate interests in employment litigation. The background stories are here and here. I have pulled up the very same PACER dockets from which these stories were allegedly researched, except I bothered to actually read them all the way through and understand what they mean. In a separate post, I will share my strong feelings as to why it is complete garbage to make a political issue out of who a lawyer has represented.)

Dear Atlanta Progressive "News," if you weren't such lazy, biased f*cking douchebags, this is what you would have reported about Kasim Reed's representation of various corporations in employment litigation:

Kasim Reed's background

Reed was admitted to the bar in 1995. He initially joined the Atlanta law firm of Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker, where he was an associate in their employment litigation department. In that role, he represented a variety of corporations in cases brought against them alleging various types of employment discrimination, unfair employment practices, and the usual sorts of claims that employment litigators are called upon to defend. After a few years at Paul Hastings, Reed left for Holland & Knight, where he continued to practice employment litigation. It is not clear if he is still a current H&K employee, or if he is either on leave of absence or has left the firm to concentrate on his mayoral race. My guess is that he will have left H&K for good if he is elected.

First, APN tried to make an issue out of Reed's biography no longer appearing on the H&K website:

According to a 2006 article from the Black Commentator, the job description for Mr. Reed published on Holland & Knight's website read: "M. Kasim Reed represents employers in employment law matters, including sex, age and disability discrimination, civil rights litigation, and contract-related disputes… He has extensive experience representing employers before various state and federal courts, as well as before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other federal and state administrative agencies."

Incidentally, since that time all references for Reed have been apparently removed from Holland & Knight's website, which is unusual, especially when a firm should be proud to have a former employee running for Mayor of Atlanta.

It is not rare at all for law firms to remove the biographies of attorneys from their websites. It happens whenever an attorney leaves a firm. It happens if an attorney goes on leave. In fact, contrary to APN's assumption that H&K would want the good press of a former attorney made good on their site, I have never heard of a big firm keeping a biography of an attorney who has left the firm on their website. This argument by APN is just stupid.

Reed's Representation of Cracker Barrel

APN then attempts to stir up a storm of controversy over Reed's representation of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain in employment litigation. As many people know, Cracker Barrel was sued for discrimination in a variety of contexts and venues over the last few decades, and did not have the greatest run of PR during that time period. APN dedicated almost an entire article to community activists and well known (and paid) Norwood supporters acting shocked that Reed would dare represent Cracker Barrel when everyone knows they're racist bad guys. And APN is correct that Reed is listed as an attorney for Cracker Barrel in the Serena McDermott case, filed in 1999. But here's the rest of the story, as deduced from the very same PACER federal court docket information that APN claims to have reviewed:

Reed was counsel of record from 1999-2001 for Cracker Barrel, in Fair Labor Standards Act case brought by a class of employees. Though the case was brought by the NAACP, and though Cracker Barrel has been sued before for discrimination, the Fair Labor Standards Act is not a race discrimination statute. The lawsuit in question sought payment of unpaid and overtime wages, based upon allegations that the employees were made to work "off the clock," putting in more hours than they actually were compensated for and accruing time that was not compensated as overtime.

In other words, Reed did not defend Cracker Barrel in any sort of race discrimination case, or ANY type of discrimination case for that matter. Shame on APN for suggesting otherwise by quoting various individuals in their article to talk about past allegations against Cracker Barrel, without making the distinction between those cases and the one case Reed worked on.

In addition, Reed worked on the McDermott case from 1999-2001. The case continued until 2005, but PACER shows he was terminated from the case on 10/16/01. He was also one of twelve different attorneys who appeared on behalf of Cracker Barrel in the litigation, according to PACER. He was a 5th-7th year associate at the time of his involvement in this case, so it is not fair to suggest that he was lead counsel or necessarily even had a significant role in crafting the defense of Cracker Barrel to this major class action litigation. Attorneys can be added to the docket of a case whenever they appear for purposes of signing a few pleadings, appearing at a deposition or hearing, or to take over temporary responsibility for another attorney. Chances are good in a case of this magnitude that many firm associates were called upon to work on the case at various times, and Reed's role may have been very small. Neither of the two articles contain any followup research by APN to review the actual pleadings in the case to attempt to deduce if Reed was signing pleadings, if he was appearing at hearings or conferences, or if he had any significant involvement in the litigation. (I have not done that yet myself, but may do so if people continue to try and insist that he was lead counsel on this case and that it somehow should matter to his mayoral chances.)

APN also apparently did not contact the Reed campaign and give them a chance to respond to the allegations that Reed defended Cracker Barrel in cases brought by aggrieved workers. (There is no reference in either of the two articles about the Cracker Barrel case that APN sought comment from Reed or his campaign.) Presumably, Reed's campaign would have provided this sort of clarification of the actual scope of his role, however vast or limited, and it would have provided the article with proper context. But proper context does not appear to be what APN was after.

Kasim Reed's Other Employment Litigation Matters

Apart from the Cracker Barrel case, APN also reported about four other employment litigation cases in which Reed was counsel of record. I've checked those dockets as well. In the case in which he represented ATC Healthcare, Reed was counsel for the defendant from 2/13/97 until the case was terimnated in 9/16/98. In the case against The Hayman Company, Reed was counsel for the defendant from 12/11/96 until the case was terminated on 5/27/97. In the case against Parsons Brinckerhoff, Reed was counsel for the defendant from 2/14/96 until the case was terminated on 3/31/98. In each of these cases, the defendants were represented by additional counsel beyond Reed, and he was only a junior or midlevel associate at the time. He was almost certainly assigned to these cases and working under the direction of a partner who actually made the strategic decisions for the direction of the case.

To act like Reed was calling the shots and standing up to defend these companies in these cases when he was probably just a BigLaw minion is either disingenous, or demonstrates complete lack of understanding for life as a BigLaw employee. Since I am a BigLaw employee, in my next post I will explain exactly why it is ridiculous for APN to expect Reed or any other law firm attorney to refuse representation of companies that have been accused of race discrimination or other bad things, and why it is even more ridiculous to hold those past representations while a BigLaw associate against Reed the mayoral candidate today.

Mood Music

One of these days
you'll go out of your way sometime

Absolutely

Stefan at Blog for Democracy gets it exactly right in his open letter to Kasim Reed, who I support in the Atlanta mayor's race. While I want Reed to win, Stefan is 100% correct that HOW you win elections is very nearly as important as WHETHER you win elections, at least for those of us who have to live in this city after a mayor is chosen. I want Reed to win (or rather, unfortunately, I don't want Mary Norwood to be my next mayor), but I don't want him to do it in a way that further polarizes city residents or reinforces the rest of the state's views of what's wrong with Atlanta.

I'm glad someone finally articulated the importance of how the next few weeks go down, because it definitely does matter and the stakes are huge.

As if I needed more evidence...

...that FSU's defense sucks balls:



(via Tomahawk Nation)

Every single Division I-A opponent FSU has played this year had their best offensive game of the season against FSU. (Well, until USF bested its 6.3 yards per play against FSU with 6.4 yards per play against WVU last weekend. But those are pretty close, and WVU also lost that game.)

But remember, I'm crazy or stupid for blaming much of our disastrous season on the completely porous defense. Right. At least I'm not alone.

Also, if you read the linked post above, it is frightening and sad how completely out of touch Bowden is with the particulars of the game he just coached. The man has checked out.

(Though, I do not agree with the suggestion in the linked post that Bobby is going to start accidentally talking racist anytime soon. That's just silly, the man has coached hundreds of players of all races for decades.)

Adventures in Dating #4: One Night Only

Today as I returned to my car from withdrawing a sizeable amount of cash at the bank (long story), I noticed that I had a missed call on my phone from a guy I had been texting with earlier about meeting up tonight. I called him back without checking to see if he had left me a voicemail, and he told me he had accidentally called my phone without realizing it. Thankfully this conversation was not terribly awkward, but it did cause me to remember a similar one that inspired this Adventures in Dating story.

A few years ago when I lived in Boston, fresh off of the breakup of my 6 year relationship and some post-breakup dating disasters that included this infamous tale, I was persuaded by some friends to try internet dating for the first time. This was in approximately 2002 or 2003, when the prospect of meeting someone over the internet was still a vaguely terrifying thing to most people (as opposed to now, when it is normal for many but still creepy and/or terrifying for others), so I was very wary of trying it. Still, I created an account on Matchmaker and went on a couple dates with guys I had absolutely zero chemistry with and prayed that they would never call me again. Some will be featured on future Adventures in Dating posts, so I don't want to shoot my wad entirely here...but let's just say I was reluctant about this whole shebang.

Then I got an email from Joe (at least I think that was his name...it's all a little hazy) and we actually had several good email conversations so I let it progress to phone calls, and after several good phone calls I decided we should go out. Joe had recently left the military, and was a single dad to boot, so he'd moved back to Massachusetts from wherever the hell he had been stationed and was living in the suburbs with his parents while he got situated. He suggested that I take the T out to a stop near where he lived and we would go to dinner, so I did. We met and had a perfectly normal dinner, and then intended to see a movie but the only thing either of us wanted to see was sold out at the one theater in this sleepy suburb. So, Joe suggested he could drive me home and we could grab a drink near my place. If you are halfway intelligent, you see where this is heading.

In a move that shocked even me, and I'm the one that did it, I invited Joe back to my place and he became my first (and to date only) one night stand. It was awful, though I will spare the particular details of why it was so bad. But I fully expected never to hear from Joe again after that night, and I wasn't real bothered by that prospect because I saw nothing I felt the need to go back to.

But ego is a funny thing, and after a few days without getting a phone call or email, I was kind of bummed that he hadn't wanted to see me again and hadn't called. Then one night, I ran downstairs quickly to the CVS next door to my apartment building for something, and when I got back there was a missed call on my cell phone from Joe. Huh, maybe he did want to see me again after all! At least now I'd get the satisfaction of not feeling rejected, even if I had to decline any future dates on account of the worst sex in the history of the universe. (OK, it wasn't THAT bad, but by God it wasn't good or even decent.)

I didn't have a voicemail message icon yet, but since I had just missed the call a couple minutes earlier, I decided to call back and see what he wanted. Joe answered, and the conversation went like this:

Me: "Hi, it's Sara, I just noticed I have a missed call on my phone from you."
He: "Um, I didn't call you."
Me: "Okaaaay...but my phone says that you, in fact, did call me and I just called back the last number that called me, and it was you."
He: "Nope, didn't call you."
Me: "Hm. Nevermind then."(This is awkward.)
He: "OK, bye."
Me: *MORTIFIED*

I never heard from him again. I suppose there are a thousand reasons why he could have not realized his phone had called me. He could have accidentally hit a button, he could have been trying to delete my number and accidentally hit send, one of his parents or a girlfriend (or, God forbid, a wife he neglected to mention) could have dialed the last number in his received calls list...who knows. It was all very shady and strange and awful. But I came away from the experience feeling completely smacked down for my naivete in calling him back without thinking for a second that perhaps there had been some mistake.

And that feeling, I think, is why I have been unable to bring myself to have any one night stands since that time. I think it was just such a dehumanizing and demoralizing experience because of that stupid non-call afterwards that I decided then and there never to expose myself to such humiliation ever again.